


Abscissa

by Eshnoazot



Series: Locomotion [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Hero's Journey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-14 02:02:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5725582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eshnoazot/pseuds/Eshnoazot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she is a child, she walks through a desert in the daylight; an empty desolate place purged of all life and welcome with broken ships decaying into sand dunes. She scavenges precious parts from within broken hulls and builds survival from twisted metal and unbearing heat. </p><p>An Astro-mech socket becomes a half ration, a lateral stabilizer two-thirds; a microvalve finds her a whole ration. Ship components become food in a way that her half-memories of green growth has never been; she looks at the wreckage and feels pangs of hunger born from instinctual calculations of ration-values.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Abscissa

When she is a child, she walks through a desert in the daylight; an empty desolate place purged of all life and welcome with broken ships decaying into sand dunes. She scavenges precious parts from within broken hulls and builds survival from twisted metal and unbearing heat.  
An Astro-mech socket becomes a half ration, a lateral stabiliser two-thirds; a microvalve finds her a whole ration. Ship components become food in a way that her half-memories of green growth has never been; she looks at the wreckage and feels pangs of hunger born from instinctual calculations of ration-values.

She scratches tallies into the wall of her AT-AT (which is not her home; her home is far far away and carried in the hearts of her family who are somewhere, _alive_ , amidst the stars). She finds orange fabric snagged behind a cargo container and makes herself a doll, a Rebel Alliance pilot, from the junk fields and holds her most precious luxury in tiny weathered hands. She is _Rey_ , and she inhales sand deeply into her scorched lungs and grinds fine grains of the desert into her cuts until the desert swirls in her veins. She is a daughter of the desert, born from crushing dunes and raw-burnt skin, and she hears her heart racing and thick blood pumping to the song of the desert air.

She is _Rey_ , and her calluses’ are only skin deep, and she sets her jaw square with a defiant challenge to her world, but never with cruelty. She inhales deeply and feels the sand swirling around all living creatures, the only constant in life.

She is _Rey_ , and she is powerful under the daylight; built from a fierce will to survive, a backbone re-enforced by an indomitable spirit, and created ever stronger by bone-crushing loneliness that seeks to survive just one sandstorm more until her family returns.

And they will.

When she is a child, she walks through a temple in her dreams; an empty desolate place purged of all life and welcome. The cavernous halls ache for a warmth she cannot give in her dreams, yet she can feel the very stone mourn for dead children and unkempt promises. She can feel a foreboding sense of dread, then terror, and sacrifice, followed by nothing at all.

She walks in a dead building which cries out with more sorrow and more pain than the stars above have ever seen. It caresses her bare skin and pulls at her, whispering great secrets left untold for millennia. It whispers of memorials built from decaying tea leaves, fingerprints and blankets still scented by skin. It whispers of great archives destroyed through defiance, of burns scarred deeply into pillars, of a collection of broken lightsabers thrown into the cracks and crevices of a civilisation crashing to the ground in a blaze of burning skin and boiling blood.

This is what loneliness is, she understands, slow agonising loneliness.

Her bare feet sympathise with the cool marble beneath, and so she walks on. There is past perpetual death in this place that she cannot hope to fix, nor can she find any hope to scavenge but there is honour and duty in witnessing the fall of an era, if only in her dreams. There is a great kindness in remembering that which is now ash and bone, even if it is only the gentle slopes of a once great temple. There is a great kindness in walking amidst the skeletal remains of a great war, battered by the all-consuming sandstorms of Jakku.

The temple whispers to her as she moves forever onwards, whispers frantic names into her ear and presses her mind to remember, with a strange desperation that she cannot understand. But she can feel the desperate feeling of loneliness and fear deep in her vibrating heart, and can feel the temple as it envelops her in soft emotions that beckon her to find it when she awakens.

 _‘Skywalker’_ She hears, only once, when she falls asleep amidst the rage of a sandstorm.

She isn’t sure whether the word is an accusation, a reminder, a comfort or a sign.

When she is a child, before her family leaves her behind to the tender care of Unkar Plutt, she walks hand in hand with people she cannot possibly imagine, cannot even conjure. She had walked in a land she cannot remember, or dare to dream was even real. She hazily remembers the touch of human skin, hazily remembers rounded smooth stones, and can only remember the feeling of _ease_.

She remembers an acidic taste in her mouth, the feeling of ice pressed against her teeth, the smooth feeling of a brush through her hair and the feeling of a guttural language spoken around her. She thinks she remembers the feeling of second-hand desperation and muffled apologies against her skin but they fade as quickly as tears in the heat until all she remembers is the sting of sand against her skin when a ship flew away leaving her behind with a creature with a palm filled with far too few credits.

She remembers burning sun, and how her skin blistered in shades of crimson, carmine, cardinal ruby torture, remembers the agony of burning skin and anger - _You left me here! Why would you, my family, leave me here to burn?!_

She remembers the pain of being unable to eat and unable to move, until Unkar Platt drops supplies at her feet in never-repeated charity. And she burns and burns on the inside until she pays off her debt and learns to bind her arms and cover her skin to protect herself from the vengeful burning. She remembers pressing her bound back to the freezing metal of the AT-AT at night, sighing in momentary relief. That night she carves the first stroke of anticipation into the wall, deeper than any she will ever make. The force of fury, loneliness and abandonment slices metal as easily as her feet in the sand. 

And she waits until the anger and injustice have evaporated like water in the heat, until she squares her jaw and her shoulders and cultivates rough calluses' like badges of honour - badges of survival. She waits until the desert has eroded her rage and fury into fine sand, and has blown them far far away, remaking her anew.

When she is a scavenger; she walks through the marketplace and makes a decision. She looks down at a tiny droid, lost amongst the sand and heat, and calculates its value – _sixty whole rations_! – and listens to the swirling of the desert sands, and remembers the slow agonising loneliness of the temple in her dreams.  There is a great kindness in remembering that which is now ash, but this droid is not ash and is _alive_ in the same way that the great Star Destroyer Graveyard is not.

She is _Rey_ , and she is a scavenger of precious parts and skeletal remains, and this droid is neither. This droid is as tiny as she once was, just as lost and desperately searching for the family of its own. The square set of her jaw is _never_ cruel, and she will not become an enslaver of life in a place where life is so rare. She will not let her calluses’ cover her heart and take the easy path for her own comfort; she will not calculate food from perpetual suffering.

_“Actually, the droid's not for sale.”_

She is Rey, and when she is grown; she _runs_.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave reviews; A new fandom calls for a new way of engaging with lore. I'd love to hear feedback, if you have the time!


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